There are few songs that have been recorded more times by a wider range of artists than “A Satisfied Mind.”

Written by Joe “Red” Hayes and Jack Rhodes and made famous in 1955 by Porter Wagner, it has since become a country and western standard. Today, there are at least 34 different versions of the song performed by some of the biggest names in American music, including Gram Parsons, Joan Baez, Lucinda Williams and Bob Dylan. (Click to continue reading…)

There’s an intriguing study out of the University of New Hampshire that shows a relationship between how secure you feel and how you value possessions. People with heightened feelings of interpersonal feelings, which is defined by a sense of being loved and accepted by others, seem to value their possessions less than those who don’t have those same feelings. Professor Edward Lemay, an assistant professor of psychology, and his team discovered that “people who did not feel secure placed a value on an item that was five times greater than the value placed on the same item by more secure people.”

“People value possessions, in part, because they afford a sense of protection, insurance, and comfort,” Lemay says. “But what we found was that if people already have a feeling of being loved and accepted by others, which also can provide a sense of protection, insurance, and comfort, those possessions decrease in value.”

The researchers theorize that the study results could be used to help people with hoarding disorders

Having seen a few minutes of TV shows about hoarders and reading news stories about their obsessions, I’m not surprised that this link may exist. All of the stories I’ve read or seen have painted hoarders as solitary individuals with limited social contact with others, which is usually the result of a psychological disorder.

Here’s what the passage said, it was in reference to how you could force yourself to save and control destructive consumer spending behavior:

John Leland wrote a very interesting article in the New York Times in which he described a growing trend of self-shame: “When a woman who calls herself Tricia discovered last week that she owed $22,302 on her credit cards, she could not wait to spread the news. Tricia, 29, does not talk to her family or friends about her finances, and says she is ashamed of her personal debt. Yet from the laundry room of her hom in northern Michigan, Tricia does something that would have been unthinkable — and impossible — a generation ago: She goes online and posts intimate details of her financial life, including her net worth (now a negative $38,691), the balance and finance charges on her credit cards, and the amount of debt she has paid down ($15,312) since starting the blog about her debt last year.”

It is also clear that Tricia’s blog is part of a larger trend. Apparently there are dozens of Web sites (maybe there are thousands by now) devoted to the same kind of debt blogging (from “Poorer than You” poorerthanyou.com and “We’re in Debt” wereindebt.com to “Make Love Not Debt” makelovenotdebt.com and Tricial’s Web page: bloggingawaydebt). Leland noted, “Consumers are asking others to help themselves develop self-control because so many companies are not showing any restraint.”

BLogging about overspending is important and useful, but as we saw in the last chapter, on emotions, what we truly need is a method to curb our consumption at the moment of temptation, rather than a way to complain about it after the fact.

The book is very very good and provides great insight into how predictably irrational we are.